An important goal of any web-based search engine involves determining the best pages to return in response to a query. Various factors are often utilized to “boost” the importance of web pages in order to have the best pages appear higher up in the search results. For public search engines that search web pages across the entire web, relative popularity of relevant web pages is often used as a boost factor, i.e., the more often a page is viewed, the higher it should appear in the results of a given query. Another technique involves tracking the number of click-thru's for search results, and boosting the pages that receive the most. This particular technique has limitations in that it leads to a closed feedback loop in which lower results have no ability to increase their standing since users rarely look beyond the first five or so results.
Implementing effective boosting techniques becomes even more challenging for site specific search engines, such as company search engines, that allow users to search pages within a specific portal or site. One technique is to have the site owner select pages that are known to have good content for particular queries. However, this technique does not scale well for sites having thousands of pages and changing content. Two of the most useful recent innovations, link popularity and anchor text, do not work well for a site specific search engine because such information is not likely to be present as a site specific search does not crawl and index pages outside of its own domain. Accordingly, the current state of the art has limited techniques for boosting web pages in a site specific search engine.